Municipalities often lack the knowledge to make villages and neighborhoods natural gas-free. To accelerate the process of making Drenthe natural gas-free, the twelve Drenthe municipalities are jointly hiring a team of specialists.
‘Smart thinkers’ is what Noordenveld councilor Kirsten Ipema calls the members of the team. And according to her, there is a need for this to achieve the goal: to be natural gas-free by 2050. “It is intended to help municipal organizations with everything that comes our way in the heat transition.”
In 2021, the municipalities will put on paper how they want to make their municipality natural gas-free, for example with heating networks or hydrogen districts. According to Ipema (Municipal Interests), the twelve municipalities often encounter the same practical issues when implementing plans. “So it is useful to do it together, it is not that we have years of experience with this. This is all new.”
And so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel yourself, there is now the Flexteam Heat Transition Drenthe. “We often hire people who then write advice; an hourly invoice,” says Ipema, who has the file in her portfolio within the Association of Drenthe Municipalities. “What you want is to acquire knowledge yourself. With the flex team we do not hire them, but we have them as municipalities ourselves. They can copy the knowledge to the twelve municipalities.”
In addition, municipalities can also submit specific questions for their village or district to the team. The costs of the flex team are 1.5 million euros per year, municipalities together pay one million, the province puts half a million on the table.